Once everyone was gone, I walked up and down the aisle, running my hand along the tops of the seats. They had the sensation of fabric, but not the cheap, scratchy kind you get on actual planes. Instead, it felt like the fibers were made of delicate spiderwebs, light and soft, but somehow not dissolving underneath my fingertips. When I looked out one of the tiny, rounded windows, I saw that the outside looked like cotton candy too. Big, puffy clouds lit by a beautiful orange-pink sunset. I wanted to see it up close. That was when I realized, I could.

I focused on my feet like the doctors had taught me. “Always find your solid ground first,” they said, citing the experiences of dreamdivers they’d worked with in the past, always couching every piece of advice in the understanding that “every dreamdiver is unique. What works for one might not work for you.” I guess that’s why they have me fill out all these evaluations, to see what works.

The ground thing does work for me, and worked beautifully with the plane. I felt the carpet beneath my feet, the rumble of the engine as the plane moved through the sky, and concentrated on it all disappearing. It didn’t go right away, so I grabbed onto the back of a fluffy seat, closed my eyes, and imagined the seat being a cloud instead. And then it was.

I was still on solid ground. Not physically, there was no pressure against my feet, no texture, but I knew I wasn’t going to plummet to the ground thousands of feet below. I was floating amongst those pink and fluffy clouds, nothing but air under my feet. Nothing but the dusky sky around me.

A light wind blew across my face, warm and smelling of flowers. The wind had shape and texture, somehow carrying light on its wings, so that a glow pirouetted through the air, twisting the clouds into swirls so fluffy and full they looked good enough to eat. It felt like the most natural thing to walk over to one of them, my feet sinking and bouncing into the perfectly buoyant air as I went, and reach out my hand. Instead of pushing my arm through vapor—the way it would have worked if I had been, somehow, touching a real cloud—my hand met with the swirl, solid and soft. My fingers wrapped around it, grasping the bit of cloud and bringing it to my face. It shaped itself into a cartoonish version of a cloud and it tasted like a cartoon cloud. Like ice cream and cotton candy and every bit of animated food you see in movies as a kid that you wished were real.

I was eating a cloud, simply because I wanted to.